Two social minds in one brain? error-related negativity provides evidence for parallel processing pathways during social evaluation

ABSTRACT

Several authors assume that evaluative conditioning (EC) relies on high-level propositional thinking. In contrast, the dual-process perspective proposes two processing pathways, one associative and the other propositional, contributing to EC. Dual-process theorists argue that attitudinal ambiguity resulting from these two pathways’ conflicting evaluations demonstrate the involvement of both automatic and controlled processes in EC. Previously, we suggested that amplitude variations of error-related negativity and error-positivity, two well-researched event-related potentials of performance monitoring, allow for the detection of attitudinal ambiguity at the neural level. The present study utilises self-reported evaluation, categorisation performance, and neural correlates of performance monitoring to explore associative-propositional ambiguity during social attitude formation. Our results show that compared to associative-propositional harmony, attitudinal ambiguity correlates with more neutral subjective evaluations, longer response times, increased error commission, and diminished error-related negativity amplitudes. While our findings align with dual-process models, we aim to offer a propositional interpretation. We discuss dual-process theories in the context of evolutionary psychology, suggesting that associative processes may only represent a small piece of the EC puzzle.

KEYWORDS:

• Dual-process cognition
• evaluative conditioning
• event-related potential
• social evaluation
• evolutionary psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Note that “unconscious” refers to the fact that automatic processes do not need to be consciously monitored to occur, not that they occur without stimulus perception, that their cognitive end-product is not consciously accessible, or that it does not affect phenomenology in any way, shape, or form.

2 See Dawkins (1982) for an explanation as to why natural selection is not a human engineer but a blind designing process that does not erase previously evolved mechanisms when new adaptations render them obsolete.

3 To clarify, the relationship between “valence” and “morality” was strictly limited to the manipulation of valence as a function of USs’ degree of morality. Please note that this study is neither about moral cognition nor that morality is to be here understood as a semantic category.

4 Possibilities include misunderstanding of the instructions or active attempts to circumvent an assumed form of manipulation by the experimenter.

5 The claim that evaluative conditioning is strictly mediated by high-order, conscious, deliberative reasoning about complex relations would imply both the emergence of such function in late hominins and the impossibility to condition evaluations in animals.

6 Obviously, our claim implies the possible but optional (i.e., pre-conscious) availability of the mental statement that several authors associate with propositional thinking. We speculate that such implication might lead these authors to qualify the automatic processes we describe here as non-propositional but merely relational.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.